Selected human nature quotes

1. The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.

2. I have not come into this world to make men better, but to make use of their weaknesses.

3. Art attests to what is inhuman in man.

4. War is a perversion of sex.

5. I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.

6. How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.

7. Nothing can discourage the appetite for divinity in the heart of man.

8. Analysis of rebellion leads at least to the suspicion that, contrary to the postulates of contemporary thought, a human nature does exist, as the Greeks believed. Why rebel if there is nothing permanent in oneself worth preserving? ... Rebellion, though apparently negative, since it creates nothing, is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man which must always be defended.

9. A man must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions, and their sufferings.

10. Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.

11. To be human means to feel inferior.

12. Man knows much more than he understands.

13. There will be certain things in a man that have to be won, not forced; inspired, not compelled.

14. Limited in his nature, infinite in his desires, man is a fallen god who remembers the heavens.

15. Man is the nobler growth our realms supply, And souls are ripened in our northern sky.

16. No man thinks there is much ado about nothing when the ado is about himself.

17. But who ever yet was offered a secret and declined it?

18. Man is by nature a political animal.

19. He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

20. It is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.

21. Bad men are full of repentance.

22. Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.

23. Most people would rather give than get affection.

24. I don't understand you. You don't understand me. What else do we have in common?

25. It's sometimes easier to do the impossible than to do the embarrassing.

26. The trouble is that sex is a force of nature, and reason is not.

27. Beware! I'm acting under the influence of human nature.

28. We are made of emotions. We are all looking for emotions, basically. It's only a question of finding the way to experience them.

29. We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.

30. There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.

31. No collection of people who are all waiting for the same thing are capable of holding a natural conversation. Even if the thing they are waiting for is only a taxi.

32. People remain what they are even if their faces fall apart.

33. War is like love, it always finds a way.

34. Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.

35. I had supposed until that time that it was quite common for parents to love their children, but the war persuaded me that it is a rare exception. I had supposed that most people liked money better than almost anything else, but I discovered that they liked destruction even better. I had supposed that intellectuals frequently loved truth, but I found here again that not ten per cent of them prefer truth to popularity.

36. If I had spent fourteen months in a small room with Jesus, I'd want to fist fight with him.

37. As soon as the war ended, we located the one spot on earth that hadn't been touched by the war and blew it to hell.

38. Most people are sheep, and they need the support of others.

39. Ever since I was a child I have had this instinctive urge for expansion and growth. To me, the function and duty of a quality human being is the sincere and honest development of one's potential.

40. Humans are very aggressive and scrappy, and go to war at the drop of a hat. However, a standard land war is no longer going to work as it is no longer technically possible.

41. Animals can learn, but it is not by learning that they become dogs, cats, or horses. Only man has to learn to become what he is supposed to be.

42. Freedom means freedom from forces and circumstances which would turn man into a thing, which would impose on man the passivity and predictability of matter. By this test, absolute power is the manifestation most inimical to human uniqueness. Absolute power wants to turn people into malleable clay.

43. Old age equalizes - we are aware that what is happening to us has happened to untold numbers from the beginning of time. When we are young we act as if we were the first young people in the world.

44. Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart.

45. The Paleolithic hunters who painted the unsurpassed animal murals on the ceiling of the cave at Altamira had only rudimentary tools. Art is older than production for use, and play older than work. Man was shaped less by what he had to do than by what he did in playful moments. It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities.

46. When grubbing for necessities man is still an animal. He becomes uniquely human when he reaches out for the superfluous and extravagant.

47. Whoever originated the cliche that money is the root of all evil knew hardly anything about the nature of evil and very little about human beings.

48. Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.

49. The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man.

50. The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist.

51. While every human being has a capacity for love, its realization is one of the most difficult achievements.

52. Communism is in conflict with human nature.

53. Religion is not a popular error; it is a great instinctive truth, sensed by the people, expressed by the people.

54. Ideas came with explosive immediacy, like an instant birth. Human thought is like a monstrous pendulum; it keeps swinging from one extreme to the other.

55. Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.

56. Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.

57. I couldn't regard myself as personally repulsive. No man can, or, if he ever comes to do so, that is the end of him.

58. If your sexual fantasies were truly of interest to others, they would no longer be fantasies.

59. We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

60. Base and crafty cowards are like the arrow that flieth in the dark.

61. There is in human nature generally more of the fool than of the wise.

62. Who then to frail mortality shall trust But limns the water, or but writes in dust.

63. There is nothing more uncommon than common sense.

64. There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise; it is because of indolence that they do not return. Yet perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return.

65. Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

66. Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.

67. It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment.

68. Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.

69. A man is a man to the extent that he is a superman. A man should be defined by the sum of those tendencies which impel him to surpass the human condition.

70. I refuse to stand up in front of a rabbi and my friends and the woman I love - who I will tell you I can love with all my heart - and promise she will be the only one I will ever have until the day I die. That's a lie.

71. Most people work just hard enough not to get fired and get paid just enough money not to quit.

72. Only a fool has no regrets and I'm not a fool.

73. I've studied men from my topsy-turvy Close, and I reckon, rather true. Some are fine fellows: some, right scurvy; Most, a dash between the two.

74. In tragic life, God wot, No villain need be! Passions spin the plot: We are betrayed by what is false within.

75. Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.

76. It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.

77. Sanity is madness put to good uses.

78. The desire for freedom resides in every human heart. And that desire cannot be contained forever by prison walls, or martial laws, or secret police. Over time, and across the Earth, freedom will find a way.

79. There is a Destiny which has the control of our actions, not to be resisted by the strongest efforts of Human Nature.

80. Men's minds are as variant as their faces. Where the motives of their actions are pure, the operation of the former is no more to be imputed to them as a crime, than the appearance of the latter; for both, being the work of nature, are alike unavoidable.

81. For I think it is the case with genius that it is not when quiescent so very much above mediocrity as the difference between the two might lead us to think, but that it has the power and privilege of rising from that level to a height utterly far from mediocrity: in other words that its greatness is that it can be so great.

82. The Divine Light is always in man, presenting itself to the senses and to the comprehension, but man rejects it.

83. I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.

84. We must recognise the essential underlaying savagery in the animal called man, and return to older and sounder principles of national life and defense. We must realise that man's nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake.

85. Egocentrics are attracted to the inept. It gives them one more excuse for patting themselves on the back.

86. Look into any man's heart you please, and you will always find, in every one, at least one black spot which he has to keep concealed.

87. Money doesn't change men, it merely unmasks them. If a man is naturally selfish or arrogant or greedy, the money brings that out, that's all.

88. Nature has not implanted any power in man that was not meant to be exercised at times, though too often our powers have been abused. The privilege, inborn and inalienable, that every man has of dying himself, and inflicting death upon another, was not given to us without a purpose. These are the last resources of an insulted and unendurable existence.

89. But are sailors, frequenters of fiddlers' greens, without vices? No; but less often than with landsmen do their vices, so called, partake of crookedness of heart, seeming less to proceed from viciousness than exuberance of vitality after long constraint: frank manifestations in accordance with natural law.

90. Sports is human life in microcosm.

91. When you argue with your inferiors, you convince them of only one thing: they are as clever as you.

92. There is great treasure there behind our skull and this is true about all of us. This little treasure has great, great powers, and I would say we only have learnt a very, very small part of what it can do.

93. Scratch the Christian and you find the pagan - spoiled.

94. I feel guilty for being a member of the human race.

95. Mankind is like dogs, not gods - as long as you don't get mad they'll bite you - but stay mad and you'll never be bitten. Dogs don't respect humility and sorrow.

96. I'll tell you one thing: Don't ever give anybody your best advice, because they're not going to follow it.

97. It's a slight stretch of the imagination but most people are alike in most ways so I've never had any trouble identifying with the character that I'm playing.

98. When plugged in, the least elaborate computer can be relied on to work to the fullest extent of its capacity. The greatest mind cannot be relied on for the simplest thing; its variability is its superiority.

99. In vain we call old notions fudge, And bend our conscience to our dealing; The Ten Commandments will not budge, And stealing will continue stealing.

100. A marciful Providunce fashioned us holler O' purpose thet we might our principles swaller.